Comark Enhances Revenue Assessment with SAP BW

Founded in 1977 when the PC industry was in its infancy, Comark has carved a niche by anticipating customers' needs and reacting quickly to provide computer products and supplies at very competitive prices. Comark is a more than $1.6 billion enterprise and one of the largest privately held suppliers of information technology solutions in the nation. Comark offers its customers instant access to the products they need ­ when they need them ­ stocking up to $100 million in cutting-edge products for fast availability. Comark has an unparalleled ability to source hard-to-find equipment. We also provide a full suite of value-added IT services from asset management, help desk and custom configurations to e-commerce, hardware maintenance and advanced integration. Comark is a one-stop shop for comprehensive life cycle management solutions.

Value Proposition

The computer products and services marketplace enabled Comark to develop into a premier company. The SAP Business Warehouse and analytical applications from our implementation partner, COMPENDIT, helped us develop tools to track revenues and costs, forecast and optimize our rebate revenue.

Business Challenge

Our technical services and business development groups needed help with projections and tracking their clients, product sales, product mix and revenue. We needed a solution that would help us track and forecast more accurately.

The Solution

Together Comark and COMPENDIT created a data warehouse that analyzed billing information and developed an analytic tool that forecasts and measures ongoing revenue targets. COMPENDIT demonstrated SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) flexibility and functionality with the revenue analysis solution using their accelerated BW project methodology and the extension of delivered extractors to accommodate Comark's unique requirements. Utilizing SAP user exits, the extractors were modified to access the appropriate data. Infocubes and queries were built with implementation accelerators to assist with design, documentation, sizing, testing and production support. Knowledge transfer was continuous throughout the project; however, requirements gathering, formal Comprehend-It sessions, hands-on training and informal workshops were essential at the beginning of the project.

With the CFO and COO as sponsors of BW, the Comark team was assembled by the SAP Project Manager to include resources that understood business needs and possessed technical skills. The project team consisted of four people: a COMPENDIT consultant and three Comark employees, two of which were dedicated to the project full time. We had a full-time technical/configuration person with a background in ABAP; a full-time person with a sales reporting background to define user requirements, testing specifications and documentation; and a part- time person who assisted with configuration and developed/conducted end-user training. Modular business analysts were also involved to define R/3 data issues as needed.

Comark chose to implement BW as our first data warehousing tool because we run our business almost exclusively on SAP. It is a more natural fit than third-party tools. BW offered superior flexibility in analyzing data over other R/3 reporting tools. In addition, it helps to reduce the burden on the OLTP system created by the execution of reports that could be done by BW.

Results

With COMPENDIT's help, a successful "go- live" was delivered on time and under budget. Together, we effectively implemented SAP BW and met all of our defined requirements. Through SAP BW, Comark is now able to better understand our revenue position by customer, get timely measures of progress against goals and access analytical information on demand that was previously impractical to retrieve. Currently, the business development department, finance and Comark management use BW information on a daily basis. Now, Comark continues to roll out additional analytical business applications based on SAP's Business Warehouse.